7 comments:

Every paper recommendation form I've ever seen has included a statement that the applicant has the right to view their recommendations, and a blank for the student to sign if they agree to waive that right. And I have lots of colleagues who refuse to write recommendations without that signature. An electronic equivalent is hardly barbaric!

Wait... you're not actually complaining about the Shakespearian "they", are you?

We still don't have a satisfactory approach to gender neutrality. I'm looking forward to "the applicant has waived its right...." I still use their instinctively to avoid picking a gender. I just had to wade through a whole paper alternately switching they to he and she.

Of course language changes. We would not be in this fix if we had not decided that "his," "man," "mankind," and so on could no longer be used to refer to persons of unknown gender, as used to be perfectly proper. I particularly like the way the Massachusetts General laws still define rape: "Whoever has sexual intercourse or unnatural sexual intercourse with a person, and compels such person to submit by force and against his will …." We decided for political reasons that this grammatical construction would no longer do. Fine. Different workarounds work under different circumstances. In this particular case "his or her" works fine. It is awkward when you have to keep repeating it. Sometimes the whole sentence can be pluralized (doesn't work for the waiver). Sometimes passives work. Sloppy use of "their" can be semantically ambiguous.

Actually, if I could fix one irrational thing about English it would be the convention of putting periods and commas (but not semicolons or question marks) inside closed quotation marks even when they semantically belong outside. There is an example of that absurdity in the paragraph above!

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About Me

I am Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where I have taught since 1974. For eight years, from 1995-2003, I served as Dean of Harvard College.